Chapter 1, Building a Simple Blog, introduces you to each of the main components of Backbone and how they work together. If you haven't used Backbone before, this is important groundwork; if you have, this will be your refresher on the purpose of each Backbone piece.

Chapter 2, Building a Photo-sharing Application, shows you how to build a photo sharing website similar to Instagram. Among other things, you'll learn how to customize the way Backbone models are sent to and received from the server. This is because we'll be using a Backbone model to upload files.

Chapter 3, Building a Live Data Dashboard, takes things to the next level by building an application that continually polls the server for changes to a dataset, effectively creating a live application. We'll also look at better code organization.

Chapter 4, Building a Calendar, will continue the theme of building apps with well-organized code. We'll also learn about properly distributing application functionality.

Chapter 5, Building a Chat Application, goes in a different direction by using Socket.IO to control the transfer of data between the client and the server. Also, we'll use the Marionette framework to make our jobs a little easier.

Chapter 6, Building a Podcast Application, shows that not every Backbone application is client-side code, some applications will have a lot of server code. We'll also look at building some custom infrastructure to work with Backbone.

Chapter 7, Building a Game, wraps up the book with a fun project. We'll review all the main components of Backbone, as well as building non-Backbone pages to create a more complete web application. Of course, we'll also have to write the game logic.

Since this book is mostly about client-side code, the main tools are a text editor and a browser. However, there are a few others you'll need. You'll have to install Node.js (http://nodejs.org), which comes with npm, the Node package manager. If you're on a Mac, that's all you'll need. However, if you are on Windows, you'll also want to have a version of Python 2 (preferably 2.7.3) and Express 2013 for Windows Desktop; you'll need these to install the bcrypt Node.js package for some of the chapters.

This book is written for anyone who wants to learn the Backbone library proficiently; by building seven very different applications, you'll quickly learn all the ins and outs of Backbone. Hopefully, you'll also improve your coding skills, for both client and server coding.

Of course, you'll need to know a few things before we get started. You should have a decent working knowledge of JavaScript. More nuanced language features will be explained in the text, but you should be able to hold your own most of the time. Also, all the server code we write will be in Node.js, so you'll want to be familiar with that. If you understand that Node.js code is often asynchronous and that's why it uses callbacks, you'll be fine. You'll want to be familiar with HTML and CSS; while they will not feature heavily, they will have their parts to play.

You might wonder if you need to be familiar with Backbone at all to benefit from this book. You'll probably be a little more comfortable with it all if you understand the basics of Backbone, and what the general purposes of its main components are. However, if you've not used it, don't worry. The very first chapter will introduce you to all the parts of Backbone by using them in a simple application.

In this book, you will find a number of styles of text that distinguish between different kinds of information. Here are some examples of these styles, and an explanation of their meaning.

Code words in text, database table names, folder names, filenames, file extensions, pathnames, dummy URLs, user input, and Twitter handles are shown as follows: "Next, we can create a file named app.js in the public directory."

A block of code is set as follows:

var Posts = Backbone.Collection.extend({
  model: Post,
  url: "/posts"
});

When we wish to draw your attention to a particular part of a code block, the relevant lines or items are set in bold:

var User = Backbone.Model.extend({
  url: function () {
    return '/user-' + this.get('id') + '.json';
  }
});

Any command-line input or output is written as follows:

npm install passport --save

New terms and important words are shown in bold. Words that you see on the screen, in menus or dialog boxes for example, appear in the text like this: "Type in a name and click on Join, and the name will appear above in the list."

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